Okay, I get that Google has changed the world and the way business is done, and their leading-edge apps are leveling the playing field for smaller companies; but, if they’re going to employ traditional media to market those apps, they might want to bring in someone who knows what they’re doing. It’s an embarrassment, or it should be. Either they don’t realize this, or they’ve become too arrogant to care.
Filed under: Marketing Theory | Tags: census, government, marketing, new market order
The US Census provides access to valuable geo-demographic data that allows companies to more effectively targ
et narrowly defined customer segments, down to a household level. It allows retailers to better define site locations and product mix, and direct marketers to deliver more relevant messages and offers. The problem is that this data has a relatively short freshness date as the market has become increasingly fluid and dynamic, which is why the 2010 census is so important — a lot has changed over the past ten years.
Demographers are speculating that this census update might be one of the most significant of any in history, in terms of shifting demographics and clustering.
Filed under: Customer Rules | Tags: auto industry, customer experience, worst practices
Talk about leading with your chin. A car dealership in Minneapolis is actually suing one of its customers because they made a mistake — this has to be one of the best worst practices I’ve seen in awhile.
The case in point is a woman named Tammie Townsend who leased a 2007 Chrysler Pacifica from Walser Chrysler in Hopkins, MN, then agreed to purchase the vehicle when the dealer offered a very attractive buyout price, well below blue book value. She opted to finance through the dealer and signed the contract, driving off with a pretty good deal. Or was it a steal?
I don’t know about you, but I’m finding it very interesting to watch what appears to be a desperation move (or is it a Kamikaze mission?) by Domino’s Pizza, as the company has launched an aggressive mea culpa campaign using traditional advertising and social media, including a high visibility video on YouTube, in an attempt to resuscitate its dying brand. The campaign is essentially an admission that their pizza sucks — at least in the minds of customers. Domino’s has listened and is responding with a complete overhaul of the product.
Domino’s president Patrick Doyle speaks to us from his corporate headquarters in Ann Arbor about how painful it was to hear focus group participants describe how bad his pizza is; the crust tastes like cardboard, the sauce like ketchup, the cheese tasteless and processed. The average frozen pizza is far superior. A vocal leader in the focus group sessions, a woman named Adrian, proclaims it to be the worst excuse for pizza she’s ever seen. Ouch. That’s not a wound, it’s a head shot.
Filed under: Business Models | Tags: customer experience, email, marketing, word of mouth
Here’s a thought: when companies ask if the customer wants to unsubscribe from unwanted email solicitation, they should honor that request, or they shouldn’t ask. Very often they do not but are merely complying with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. In many cases by unsubscribing we are merely validating our email addresses for distribution to more spam lists.
It would seem this should be a matter of proper social etiquette — especially for a company that is in the social etiquette business.
Filed under: Marketing Theory | Tags: direct mail, marketing, new market order
The death of direct mail has been greatly exaggerated. It’s not dead, but like most every other marketing medium, it has been redefined in the digital world as a much smaller yet still integral part of our complex multi-channel 
delivery and communications infrastructure.
Currently, however, it is the delivery utility and not communications that is keeping the USPS alive (though just barely with a reported loss of $3.8 billion this year). Like most organizations the USPS will have to continue to downsize and further reduce its cost structure while redefining service levels in order to survive in the new market order. The core focus going forward will be parcels and packages, competing with Fed Ex — all that stuff sold at Amazon has to get shipped. That could be an opportunity for direct marketers to break through the mailbox clutter, when there isn’t as much clutter.
Filed under: Business Models | Tags: business, employees, organizational philosophy
One of the reasons marketers have lost standing in the C-suite is that too many CMOs and marketing managers lack a basic understanding of business finance and do not speak the language of business, but that of marketing, and too often they are not aligned.
So say the principles at the Business Literacy Institute (BLI), a California consulting firm founded in 1998 that specializes in employee training, workshops and speaking engagements — to help organizations better understand the financial side of business.
“Our philosophy,” says principal and co-founder Karen Berman, “is that everyone in a company does better when they understand how financial success is measured, and how they make an impact on the company’s financial performance.”
With advertising saturation levels at a tipping point in just about every medium, both offline and online, where do advertisers go from here? Well, there’s a new ad medium that promises to break through the clutter, getting to captive audiences in a highly intimate environment: the bathroom. So now your business can reach new prospective customers while they’re doing their business.
All we need to do is replace all our existing toilets with the WOW Toilet.
It’s a universal retrofitted transparent toilet tank engineered with a space in the front to insert an advertising image or poster that is clearly displayed to users who have nothing else to look at. With more than 1.2 billion toilets in the U.S., this represents a massive new opportunity just waiting to be exploited as every one of them can be transformed into a billboard, turning otherwise wasted space into ad revenue and offering advertisers millions of potential impressions… or is it exposures?
I’ve never really bought into the idea of being your own brand. If you happen to be a celebrity, it’s a logical business brand
. But for the rest of us it seems a little pretentious, like we’re packaging ourselves and creating a more marketable image and identity; for whom, our friends and coworkers at the office? I tend to think other folks don’t view us as brands, they view us as people.
The celebrity elite is another story, as personal branding is the key to success with those icons in sports and entertainment whose lives we follow on television, gossip magazines and Twitter. After all, inquiring minds want to know. Many are a flash in the pan and most are not able to sustain for any length of time. Personal brands are far more perishable than product or company brands, susceptible to the short attention span of a fickle consumer public, or to self-destruction. Even major brands like Martha Stewart can be taken down by a single incident or breach of trust. We’ll see how Tiger does now that his brand has strayed off the fairway.
And now, in the category of worst practices for online direct marketing, the winner is: the Survival Seed Bank.
This seems like something right out of the back of a catalog mail order advertisement for bomb shelters back in the 1950s. In this case it’s targeted at a growing population of survivalists who believe the end is near, and the first thing to go will be our food supply.
The worst part is it appears to be working, which validates the premise of marketing best practices — that emotion drives response more effectively than rational consideration, with the two most powerful emotions being fear and greed (both of which come into play in this campaign).
